Thanks (day 4); I Don't Want to Fix Bugs
Sep. 19th, 2014 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timWe've achieved our $8192 goal!!!! But wait, there's more: we're increasing our goal for a second time and are trying to raise $10,000 by 5 PM Pacific time today. (If we raise $16,384, there will be filk singing.)
A thought for today:
On Reddit, user green_mage asked:
"Why ask us to pay for something you don't want to talk about?"
This was in reference to what I said in my initial post:
"I would rather not talk about diversity, inclusion, feminism, gender, race, and sexuality with my colleagues. The difference between me and -- say, the young male graduate student who attended Wouter's Haskell Symposium talk and later tweeted something to the effect that Europe didn't have a good record when it came to distinguishing people based on race and gender -- isn't how interested we are in lambdas, type theory, theorem proving, compilers, or whatever happens to make our synapses light up. We both are. The difference is that I cannot do my job while ignoring the constant drone of small -- and occasionally big -- indignities and violations that make my friends who are also my colleagues sad and, sometimes, drive them out of the field altogether."
I don't want to fix bugs in code. I would much prefer it if my code worked the first time I wrote it, so I could focus on implementing new features. Wouldn't everybody?
I fix bugs anyway. Not just because I get paid to do that -- I'd still do it even if I became independently wealthy and decided to devote the rest of my days to open-source volunteering. The reason I fix bugs is that -- as anyone who's ever used a computer knows, not just programmers -- bugs in software detract from the pleasure and delight that using good software can bring. All the new features in the world don't do much good for someone using my code if it crashes when they try to save a file.
I try to fix bugs in culture for the same reason. That we exclude people who look different from ourselves from our professional cultures -- usually without meaning to -- is a bug in human behavior. We are taught to hold onto our power; that part of the value in who we are and what we do is excluding other people from it. (This is why most women were driven out of computing in the 1960s, when it began to be a professional and profitable occupation.) Exclusion and marginalization, deliberate or accidental, distract attention from the things that unite those of us who like to program in functional languages: beauty, elegance, the Curry-Howard isomorphism.
I don't want to fix bugs. But I do it because it's part of being a programmer. I don't want to do advocacy. But I do it because if I don't, I don't feel like I'm doing my job, either.
I hope this answers green_mage's question.
Thanks to those who donated between 6:00 PM September 18 and 12:15 PM September 19 and gave permission for their names to be used and/or tweeted about it on #lambda4ada:
Aaron Miller
André Arko
Andy Adams-Moran
Dan Licatadorchard
Eni Mustafaraj
Eric Sipple
Glenn Willen
Justin Bailey
Ken Keiter
Kevin Scaldeferri
Kristylindsey
Lyn Turbak
M Wallace
Michael Greenberg
Peter Fogg
Rob Simmons
Ryan Wrightsimrob
If your name is not on the list, you've donated, and you'd like it to be, send me an email (catamorphism at gmail).
A thought for today:
On Reddit, user green_mage asked:
"Why ask us to pay for something you don't want to talk about?"
This was in reference to what I said in my initial post:
"I would rather not talk about diversity, inclusion, feminism, gender, race, and sexuality with my colleagues. The difference between me and -- say, the young male graduate student who attended Wouter's Haskell Symposium talk and later tweeted something to the effect that Europe didn't have a good record when it came to distinguishing people based on race and gender -- isn't how interested we are in lambdas, type theory, theorem proving, compilers, or whatever happens to make our synapses light up. We both are. The difference is that I cannot do my job while ignoring the constant drone of small -- and occasionally big -- indignities and violations that make my friends who are also my colleagues sad and, sometimes, drive them out of the field altogether."
I don't want to fix bugs in code. I would much prefer it if my code worked the first time I wrote it, so I could focus on implementing new features. Wouldn't everybody?
I fix bugs anyway. Not just because I get paid to do that -- I'd still do it even if I became independently wealthy and decided to devote the rest of my days to open-source volunteering. The reason I fix bugs is that -- as anyone who's ever used a computer knows, not just programmers -- bugs in software detract from the pleasure and delight that using good software can bring. All the new features in the world don't do much good for someone using my code if it crashes when they try to save a file.
I try to fix bugs in culture for the same reason. That we exclude people who look different from ourselves from our professional cultures -- usually without meaning to -- is a bug in human behavior. We are taught to hold onto our power; that part of the value in who we are and what we do is excluding other people from it. (This is why most women were driven out of computing in the 1960s, when it began to be a professional and profitable occupation.) Exclusion and marginalization, deliberate or accidental, distract attention from the things that unite those of us who like to program in functional languages: beauty, elegance, the Curry-Howard isomorphism.
I don't want to fix bugs. But I do it because it's part of being a programmer. I don't want to do advocacy. But I do it because if I don't, I don't feel like I'm doing my job, either.
I hope this answers green_mage's question.